What Makes Us Choose to Be Virtuous

Truth, habits and culture, a watcher, a star, an identity, leadership, and focus

Pompeo Batoni, Hercules at the Crossroads (1748)

I’ve been thinking about what makes people virtuous. How much of it is a conscious decision and drive, and how much is just the force of habit and culture? Whether consciously or subconsciously we make decisions every day that lead towards or away from virtuous behavior. So the question then is what affects those decisions?

This isn’t going to be an exhaustive list of reasons, but I want it to act as a starting point for anyone to look at and recognize where their own decisions come from, and where the decisions of individuals of the larger society come from.

A disclaimer: I’m not pretending I’m perfectly virtuous, but that doesn’t mean I can’t recognize what more virtuous behavior looks like, or help others learn as I explore my own capabilities. It’s important to be forgiving of others in this. Consider following an Aztec philosophy: the moral world is slippery–made of mud. Everyone slips up and falls into the mud sometimes, and it’s important we help each other get back up when we fall down.

Truth

All reasons and all motivations for virtuous behavior ultimately have a foundation in truth. You have to know, or at least have developed a habit towards doing the correct thing in the moment to moment of everyday life in order to act virtuously. If you don’t have an already established virtuous habit for a given moment in time and aren’t observing yourself, your current situation, what’s happening around you, and know the truth of these things objectively, then you won’t make the correct or virtuous decision and act on it. You have to accept reality and accept moral objectivity–that not everything is relative and there are better and worse decisions and ways of behaving.

In the classic four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance this is what prudence consists of: knowing the truth of a given situation, making the correct decision, and acting on it. It’s why Josef Pieper, along with thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, described prudence as the first and most foundational of all the virtues.

“And therefore the pre-eminence of prudence signifies first of all the direction of volition and action toward truth; but finally it signifies the directing of volition and action toward objective reality. The good is prudent beforehand; but that is prudent which is in keeping with reality.”

Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues

When you don’t accept truth, you prevent yourself from behaving virtuously. Some people have an easier time being honest with themselves than others, but we all struggle with it. Accepting your own weaknesses or where something was your fault is difficult. Likewise, accepting that maybe something wasn’t your fault, or maybe you are stronger and more capable than you realize might be something you need to do instead.

People who can’t accept their own weaknesses tend to fall into what Nietzsche described as “ressentiment”–an inferiority complex towards what someone sees as the cause of their misery. You see this behavior in social media all the time. It’s manosphere types blaming women for their problems or radfems blaming men, or far right figures blaming immigrants for why they weren’t accepted into Harvard.

So to be virtuous requires accepting truth, no matter how uncomfortable it might feel, and that means a point of departure between people who are virtuous and those who are not comes down to two aspects of accepting truth: the ability to observe and learn about the current context and your own current state objectively; and the strength (or fortitude) to accept uncomfortable truths. If you can do that then you are on your way to being virtuous.

Habits and Culture

Your habits are those behaviors trained into you by others or developed in an ad hoc fashion from navigating daily life. Do you brush your teeth every day? Do you keep your room clean? Do you say please and thank you? Simple habits like this are virtuous behaviors. You brush your teeth daily without thinking about it? Great, you are taking care of yourself and your hygiene and being courteous to others. You may not think about these habits much or even necessarily be aware of them, but virtuous habits work through accepting truth just as much as any conscious decision you make. It is objectively good to maintain good hygiene for example so that habit accepts truth.

Other habits you developed as a child thanks to parents, friends, community and culture also push you towards or away from virtuous behavior. If you grew up surrounded by people who gave up easily then you will likely have the habit of giving up easily yourself. If you grew up surrounded by people who were generous to others then you will likely have the habit of being generous yourself.

Ancient Greeks devoted vast intellectual energies towards thinking about virtue–far more than our culture today. The drive to live virtuously was embedded in their culture in ways that are difficult for us to fathom. I’ve written before about the Greek concepts of Arete–”excellence”, or the “full realization of potential”, and Agon–“a struggle”, or how one strives for arete through overcoming challenges. Struggling for excellence in life was core to the ancient Greek way of life (at least during their golden years). I want to be clear that this mostly only applies WITHIN the Greek aristocracies. They were not virtuous to huge swaths of their non-citizen population–certainly not towards the vast slave population that kept their states running.

But the behavior within the aristocratic culture was heavily focused on virtuous behavior towards themselves as individuals, towards the state, gods, and towards each other. A culture that embraced virtuous behavior for a few short centuries had the power to found what became western civilization from a few relatively small city-states.

They had a culture that understood that we grow through agon. Confronting and striving to overcome challenges strengthens us and makes us excellent. Without those challenges to test ourselves we don’t grow and don’t have the opportunity to develop virtue. The virtuous are those who choose to face agon.

You Are Being Watched

Connected with habit formation and culture is the fear and shame we have for not doing virtuous behavior if we know someone will realize what we’ve done. We are social creatures and knowing or even just believing we’re being watched will alter our behavior. “I would do it if no one was watching”. Whether it’s something morally wrong like stealing, or a vice like overeating, the effect of being watched can shame us into behaving differently than if we were alone.

It’s not always so negative. Being watched can also spur us to do things that are actively good and push us to try to do more than if we were alone. Everyone knows boys and men will usually change their behavior if they know a girl they like is watching. Usually they’re on better behavior. Of course the guy might push it too far–try to show off a little too hard–but being willing to push yourself and explore your limits is ultimately a good thing as long as it is tempered.

The Death of God comes in here as well. For thousands of years westerners believed an all knowing God or gods watched everything they did and would judge them. An all-seeing eye that knows when you do something wrong is a tremendous spur towards virtuous behavior. Whether it was the God of Abrahamic religions, or pagan sky gods, or local spirits a person always knew they were never truly alone–some entity was always watching.

This is one of the dangers of modernism and the post Death of God world. Without a belief in a divinity we can truly be alone. We can do bad things and indulge in vices that no one will ever see and no force could ever punish us for. Most people will still strive to be good and virtuous for other reasons, but it does remove one major incentive.

We don’t like to hurt other people and most of us will try our best to do good by others. But virtuous behavior also applies to how you treat yourself. It’s perhaps much harder to tell yourself not to fall for vices like gluttony or lust when you don’t believe there is any God to punish you–you’re only hurting yourself so why feel bad?

This isn’t a call for a return to religion if you’re atheist. It’s just accepting an uncomfortable truth: by disbelieving in religion we remove a major incentive for virtuous behavior. The responsibility for watching over your behavior falls to you.

Identity and A Star

Virtuous behavior requires having a purpose, or telos if you prefer the ancient Greek. You need some kind of mission, quest, or reason to keep going in life. This guiding star, whatever it may be, forces you to align your behavior towards reaching it. Without a purpose or reason to live there is no reason to do anything besides waste your time entertaining yourself or wallowing in despair as you lose the will to live. What exactly your purpose is can, and often does change throughout life, but the important thing is to have something.

I’ve written before about how we as a species need to keep moving. We need something to move towards to remain healthy, and it is through the need to move and overcome challenges that we develop virtuous behavior. I call this a star–a light in the sky that guides you. There are challenges and obstacles you have to deal with on this journey, and it is through dealing with them that virtue comes. For example, if you want to start a business then you have your star, and now you need to develop behaviors and traits that will allow you to grow and run it. Again, this comes back to truth: you will have to accept certain truths and adjust your behavior to align with those truths if you want to have a chance at success. You can’t doom scroll social media all day and get a successful business started.

A strong force that helps someone decide on a star to follow, and how they will make the journey towards it is their sense of identity. This is a question of what kind of person you see yourself as, and what kind of person do you want to be like and emulate. Role models play their role here. You encounter them as real people and you learn from how they behave, or you learn about them as celebrities, historical figures, or fictional characters.

A heavy blow against historical and fictional role models was struck in the last 20 years or so however as we deconstructed or cancelled major historical and fictional figures. Figures that once served as role models for generations of people were declared problematic. Whatever the reason why, the effect I think has been to cut down on the potential role models that we can adopt. We’re poorer for it and it makes it harder for people to know who they should emulate.

Finally we have a question about the identity your subconscious has. Regardless of what role models you have, or what you consciously might think of yourself, working in the background is the identity your subconscious has for who you are. If, deep down, your subconscious identifies as a loser, then it will work in the background to come up with excuses why you shouldn’t try. If your subconscious doesn’t see you as a successful entrepreneur then it will fight hard to sabotage you from trying to become one. This is Steven Pressfield’s concept of resistance. I described it here along with the need to have an identity that hungers for victory.

To overcome a subconscious identity that doesn’t align with your star and virtuous behavior requires work. It requires thinking deeply about your weaknesses and being honest and truthful about yourself. This is getting into psychotherapy though and is a far larger topic than I can cover here.

Leadership and Focus

This one might sound strange at first: the virtuous are leaders. Leadership means getting someone to willingly do what you want, and that “someone” here refers to yourself. You have to be capable of leading yourself.

Self leadership comes down, firstly, to understanding that what’s most important is not always what you want, but what you want to want–what will take you closer to your star. You need to make conscious what’s actually important to you in life from moment to moment. Cicero put it this way:

“That a man is able to deny himself his own desires, cross his own inclinations, and purely follow what reason directs as best, though the appetite lean the other way.”

Cicero

Once you have this in mind you can move on to the act of leading. Imagine yourself as a ship with a captain and an energetic but chaotic crew. The captain needs to know what he wants at all times from the overall mission objective down to the nitty-gritty things like how often each part of the ship should be maintained, or how each crew member should behave. The crew has energy but with no leadership it will sink into all kinds of vice and bad behavior and the ship’s journey will come to a halt.

To be your captain and lead yourself requires that you know the star you are following, and you need to know how you want each little task of daily life done. The captain in you knows to issue the order to eat a salad instead of a burger.

So to get the rest of your chaotic crew–your more primal, emotional, animalistic side–to do what the captain wants, you need to think like a leader: how do you get them to willingly put in the work required for a greater purpose? How you lead yourself is a topic for another day, but I will say that killing or suppressing that emotionally charged side of you–whipping and forcing the crew–isn’t the way. Leadership means getting that side of you to willingly do the work–not force it through sheer authoritarian rule (though sometimes you will need to bark orders).

Gaps in life where you aren’t leading yourself and you don’t have a preference and haven’t decided on anything are dangerous here. That’s where bad habits creep in to make the decision for you. You finished work but haven’t decided anything to do for the evening, so you automatically default to flipping through TikTok. Only when you know and are clear of what you want in every moment can you lead yourself. This isn’t a way of saying you should always be working though. It means you should be conscious and make an active decision of what you’ll do for leisure too. You could doom scroll social media, or you could read a book.

I got the idea for this section from watching The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes featuring Jeremy Brett (probably the best casting for Sherlock Holmes ever) and noticed how he leads himself and the party of him and Watson (when he’s not on a cocaine bender). He always knows precisely what to do next and acts on it immediately. “Come, Watson! We can just catch the overnight train if we leave now!” and will literally leap over a chair in his commitment to action. He is perfectly aligned with his star, always knows what he needs to do next from moment to moment in his work towards solving the case, and has no room for behaviors that are destructive as long as he has a case to keep his star visible.

It’s only when he has no case, no purpose, and no idea what he should do next that he falls into his drug addiction. Arthur Conan Doyle recognized this element of self-leadership and the dangers of what happens when we don’t know what to do next more than a century ago. This is old lore.

In order to keep moving towards that star requires we develop something that is sorely lacking in the contemporary world of social media, phones, and notifications: focus. You have to be able to maintain focus over long periods to be virtuous and lead yourself. Focus is what keeps you working on your journey, and the tasks you need to do for it instead of straying and redirecting your attention to your phone and social media.

Napoleon said once that genius is the ability to focus for long periods. In fact one paper even argues that the ability to focus may have played a large role in driving the evolution of modern humans. It argues that the capacity for focused attention and its emergence may have contributed to the final phase of human evolution–the evolutionarily fit were those who could focus on tasks for long periods.

If that’s true then it puts the distracting designs of modern tech into a new light: it’s literally designed to take away a core part of what makes us human. Social media, phones, and all the distraction and attention absorbing qualities they are designed for make us less human and less virtuous. It’s harder to choose to be virtuous when the very technology we carry around with us is designed to prevent it. That is the world we live in today.